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This has been a rough week for the finalists for the Magic Online Championship Series. They’ve had to endure three grueling days of play in the main event here at the World Championships, suffering through the highest level of play the game has to offer. Then, once their brains have been sufficiently turned to mush, they’ve had to trudge over to the home base for the MOCS and slug it out for three more rounds each day. At the end of the night, I’d be surprised if they knew what their own names were, let alone what those funny rectangles with pictures on ‘em were....

With Day 2 in the books and six rounds of Modern ahead of us Saturday, we now have a much clearer picture of where the Deadly Dozen (Dependable Dozen? Durable Dozen? unDefeatable Dozen?) stand in the Player of the Year race. To recap, twelve players came in with a mathematical shot to take home the coveted POY trophy. Owen Turtenwald led the field, but could be overtaken if he falls short of the finals. Anything less and one of these other 11 Pros could step in and swipe the prize out from under him. So, without further ado, here's how the POY hopefuls stand after 12 rounds of...

You may have been following Nate’s blog posts about how he was certain Mono Red would be THE deck to beat in Standard this weekend.  (Note: if you haven’t been, you should. Nate’s a fabulously dashing, lightly-bearded gentleman, and funny!) Naturally, after boasting to the rest of the coverage team about his prediction, I pointed out that he was going up against none other than Team Channel Fireball, who had identified a Tempered Steel shaped niche in the metagame, and were once again going to be hurling robots at their unsuspecting opponents. Not a man to back...

I love Gifts Ungiven. So, apparently, does U.S. National Champion Ali Aintrazi. I purchased four immediately after it came out and have hung on to the same four copies ever since. I love Gifts Ungiven so much, a chat on Wizard’s fancy new live chat coverage feature turned into me being asked to make Gifts Ungiven piles out of cupcakes. I would pour Gifts Ungiven on my cereal every morning if I could. So you can imagine my pure, unadulterated, Christmas-morning-like joy when I walked by the U.S.A. team playing last night and Aintrazi was unwrapping some gifts his opponent...

With an astonishing dozen players in the running for Player of the Year, the 2011 race is both one of the closest AND most wide open ever. It makes keeping track of things a bit difficult as the weekend goes on. While the individual scenarios for taking the POY title are long and complicated, the long and the short of it is that if none of the players on this list make the Top 8, Owen Turtenwald will be crowned Player of the Year. If Turtenwald makes the finals, he also wins the crown no matter what anyone else does. If he makes the Top 8 without winning his first match, Martin Juza,...

Alright. So...earlier in the day, I posted a blog entry about how I had predicted monored to post the best results in the Standard portion of Worlds. I made this prediction at the end of Grand Prix Hiroshima, where I had correctly predicted that Martin Juza was playing the best deck and thus going to win. Apparently, the metagame had shifted just enough by this weekend for monored to rise to prominence, but then shift slightly away from it. After seeing the results of the last couple weeks on Magic Online, the kids from Channelfireball had supposedly broken the format once again with...

If you’ve been watching the Pro Tour carefully enough over the last few years, you’d know why people are now routinely picking The Jeremy Neeman for their PT Fantasy draft teams. In 2006 (while I was covering my second ever Grand Prix) Jeremy battled his way to 4th place in Time Spiral limited, eventually losing to Anatoli Lightfoot, who in turn lost in the finals to James Zhang. That year, James became the first ever back to back Australian Grand Prix champion, having taken down Melbourne the year before, playing Extended. (I mention this because, if...

With the Standard portion of the event winding down, it affords us an opportunity to look at the metagame from the very top of the standings by looking at what's playing at the top tables. For this complete and totally scientific excercise, I took a look at who was playing what at the top eight tables. Both because Top 8 is catchy and because, by the time I got there, table nine was empty. So, without further ado (and I'm known for having too much ado in some circles), here are the decks playing at the top eight tables in the sixth round of Standard.Wolf Run Ramp (RG): 4Mono Red:...

This standard format is one of the more diverse we've seen in recent times. If there is a 'best deck' out there, then it really doesn't seem that there is a great deal of agreement on exactly what it is. With quite a few strategies proving popular at this World Championships, there is all the more pressure to get things right with a well populated sideboard.The 15 cards that you can swap into your deck for games 2 and 3 are critical if you want to succeed at high level Magic. Here at the World Championships, we've seen quite a few cards making a splash as role-players to come in from...

Flashback is a mechanic that plenty of deckbuilders here at Worlds are using to a large degree, to get value at all stages of the game. While manabases are not as easy to build in this format as in many others, the reward of being able to play various off-colour flashback costs have been sufficient incentive for people to be looking to fix their mana in all sorts of ways, and rebuy on some powerful spells.   For the red/green Kessig Wolf Run decks, it is a no brainer to have an Ancient Grudge or two in the sideboard. Tempered Steel has proven to be a powerful choice, so being...